eli5: can someone explain the phrase is “I am become death” the grammar doesn’t make any sense?

Question

Have always wondered about this. This is such an enormously famous quote although the exact choice of words has always perplexed me. Initially figured it is an artifact of translation, but then, wouldn’t you translate it into the new language in a way that is grammatical? Or maybe there is some intention behind this weird phrasing that is just lost on me? I’m not a linguist so eli5

In: 1806

Answer 1

There’s a couple of steps to this, because there’s some grammar to it, some history to it, and some translation going on.

This is what’s called the “perfect tense” – it describes an action that’s already been completed. And nowadays, we use “have” to signify that tense. “I have finished breakfast,” or “She has bought a new car.” But back in Early Modern English – Shakespeare’s time – it was totally acceptable to use “am/is/be” to convey the same meaning. You see it in Shakespeare’s plays here and there.

The most well-known writing from that time, besides Shakespeare’s work itself, is the King James Bible, the most well-known English translation, which was incredibly widely-used for hundreds of years. And the King James Bible uses the perfect tense in the same way:

>I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness.

So even though we don’t speak that way any more, that pattern is mostly ingrained in us from Biblical phrases – which lends them an air of gravitas.

Now for the translation bit – the *Bhagavad Gita*, the sacred Hindu scripture which the phrase comes from, was first translated into English in the late 1700’s, nearly 200 years after the King James Bible. The “am” version of the perfect tense was fairly uncommon by then, but the translators still wanted to give the text a classical feel. So they copied the Bible’s phrasing, and when the god Krishna was showing off his power, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds” was the translation they went with.

Oppenheimer used this version of the quote when he was discussing the atomic bomb, and so that classical, archaic phrasing is fairly stuck in the English-speaking world now.